Month in Review: Icy waters and carp fatigue

At the end of each month, Current State check in with Great Lakes commentator and journalist Gary Wilson for updates on environmental stories from around the basin. For this Great Lakes Month in Review, Gary focuses on ice cover and Asian carp fatigue.

Wilson last spoke with Current State after the Army Corps’ study on Asian carp in the Great Lakes was released. Wilson says that carp fatigue has set in, meaning that Asian carp reports are in the news so frequently that people tend to tune it out.

3 thoughts on “Month in Review: Icy waters and carp fatigue”

Yes the Asian carp reports are in the news so frequently that people tend to tune it out. The people are also concerned the Asian carp will be in Lake Michigan long before the USACE and Wash-DC will ever get Tea Party support for any funding to act.

we must not stop the fight of asian carp!! im 59 yrs old and have been fishing the great lakes since i was 5 i would hate totell my childern and grandchildern that because of politcs we will never be abel to catch anything but carp for the rest of there lives!

The “carp fatigue” that you correctly describe can only be described as a PR victory for the Army Corps and other federal and state agencies who have downplayed the issue in favor of maintaining the status quo. This was clearly the plan all along, at least in some parts of the “federal family”: deny that current efforts like the electric barrier are not working, claim that lengthy and expensive studies are needed before any long-term solutions can be discussed, and then base the study on outrageously conservative assumptions that jack up the price tag associated with any real solutions to the problem.

The most disappointing part of this to me is the lack of vision shown by officials and businesses in Illinois and Northwest Indiana. Any plan to separate the Chicago waterways from Lake Michigan would require investments in water and transportation infrastructure that the Chicago region needs anyway for its long-term economic health. What’s been missing is a genuine attempt to move beyond the rhetoric and bring all of the affected parties together to talk about a real solution. (“Stakeholder” meetings attended only by paid lobbyists don’t count.) This kind of process is something that the Federal Government could have and should have convened a long time ago, instead of approaching this as a PR and political problem as opposed to a real one.

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